Christmas Cake Decorating Ideas – No Traditional Icing!

I love Christmas, I love Christmas Cake, well I love Christmas Cake right up until the point that it gets covered with marzipan and white icing.

Countdown Supermarket came to me and asked me to come up with a Christmas Hack to share with people and 2 things sprung to mind. One was how to take a store-bought cake to the next level so that you can wow friends and family without much effort and the second thing that sprung to mind, was how to do it without resorting to my nemesis marzipan!

Countdown makes Christmas easy and affordable, especially if you use their in-store Rich Dark Fruit Cake as a base!

Christmas Buttercream

Buttercream is my favourite type of icing, I know it’s not as gorgeous as say fondant,but let’s face it. Buttercream tastes good. I tried a few different ideas for buttercream flavours with a Christmas cake, but ended up with this very very very simple idea. Add Apricot Jam to your buttercream and it tastes amazing with a Rich Dark Fruit Cake from Countdown and you are on to a winner!

Christmas Cake with Glazed Fruit & Nuts

Countdown has a fantastic range of nuts and dried fruit in their baking section and leading up to Christmas so many of them are on Price Lockdown or Special. So I raided their baking section to come up with the ingredients for my glazed fruit and nut topping. I stuck the fruit and nut crust together with a little apricot jam glaze so that it would work with the apricot-infused buttercream, and voila, a cake that tastes good and I think looks like you’ve gone to a little effort! I love the fruit and nut crust as you can go crazy with whatever combo you like, and it literally takes 5 minutes to put together!

Decorating a Christmas cake without marzipan or traditional icing

To decorate your Christmas Cake without Marzipan you can either fill and ice a cake with the buttercream, or you top the cake with the fruit and nut crust. Or you can go all out, stack two cakes with buttercream AND top with the fruit and nut crust.

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I like usually your recipes but this one…no.
Why? Because of the huge amount of sugar in it. Just think a bit…sugar in : ready made cake (made with who knows what other preservatives in it!), sugar in the apricot jam, icing sugar, dried apricots are also preserved/coated (maybe) with sugar !!!! Just thinking at my pancreas and at the high amount of insulin it has to produce to rebalance the boold sugar levels…no thanks! Definitely not for me this recipe! I love my body and health too much !
Wishing you luck with your further goodies! Hoping they are healthier!

Yes on Birthdays and Christmas I don’t worry about sugar content at all! I am a buttercream lover, and yes most of the time I don’t have it. BUT when I do I don’t feel guility I love it and enjoy it. Yay for Christmas